... when Congresswoman Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY) answered the first question at the Clay Town Hall event during her Town Hall Candidate Forum on Benghazi, she told me something I had not heard before:

In fact the two men who were subsequently killed went in against orders because they were told to stand down and they felt that the ambassador was in/at risk and they needed to go in and help him.

I was immediately brought to tears and thought of the Texans at the Alamo.

* * *

I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch — The enemy is receieving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days.

If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country.

The poll also found that Romney has an even greater advantage among middle class voters, 52 percent to 45 percent.

.... The poll’s election model takes into account variables including voter intensity, age, and education, and voters who are certain in their vote. The race “remains very close in the surface,” Goeas said, “but the political environment and the composition of the likely electorate favor Governor Romney.”

The White House confirmed that Jay-Z did visit the White House Wednesday for a quick, unscheduled visit with the president. A white House aide told CNN that special visitors occasionally visit the Situation Room.

While we wait to see who loses power from that nasty Sandy Frankenstorm.... we're reading The Optimistic Conservative. J.E. Dyer is a retired US Naval intelligence officer, and her blog is Highly Recommended.

.... If a US mission is under attack, “flash”-precedence reports go directly to the White House and the president is notified immediately, regardless of what he is doing.

His relevant cabinet heads – e.g., Defense, State – are being notified by their people at the same time. Each one has a 24-hour watch, like the watch in the White House Situation Room, whose senior officers are charged precisely with ensuring that such notifications are made, that inter-agency coordination starts immediately, and that a running assessment of the situation is maintained for briefing and decision-making at the drop of a hat.

If that did not happen on 11 September, and if it really takes two months to reconstruct what did happen on 11 September (the administration’s investigative report is due to the Senate on 17 November), then that itself is a serious breach of national-security protocol.

One would be driven to wonder how things could have gotten so bad. It is simply not the case that the chain of command falls apart and no one can tell what’s going on, or who’s giving orders, and that it all has to be sorted out later. (This is especially true, incidentally, in the era of instantaneous emails, voice communications, and live Predator video being fed to command centers in Europe and the Washington, DC area.)

One thing that is always known is what the president ordered – because it is recorded in logs and other official documents. And again, if it wasn’t, that is not an excuse but an indictment.

We can say for sure what Obama should have known; we can’t say for sure what he did know. But what he should have known is enough.

Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer said tonight that his sources tell him that Obama was one of the people in the room watching the Benghazi attack go down and both he and Col. David Hunt agree it would have taken an order by the president to intervene.

Further, Col. Hunt said that we were only 20 min away by jet and a couple of hours away by AC-130 gunships and special forces, and the decision not to intervene had to be political.

Sunday, 28 October 2012

From Judy Lash Balint: The inside of the Golden Gate--Shaar HaRachamim in Hebrew; the closed double gate on the eastern wall of the Mount, through which we expect Mashiach to appear.

The Golden gate is located on the east walls of the old city of Jerusalem, leading to the temple mount ....built in the 6th/7th C AD over the ruins of the second temple gate, and sealed since the 16th C.

.... The woman whose policy had overthrown the Libyan government and then placed a barely defended consulate in the middle of a city of Jihadists, did not promise the grieving father that his son's killers would pay. She promised him that the man who offended his son's killers would pay. Not only would his son be the first casualty of that appeasement policy, but the Constitution that his son had sworn to support and defend would be the second casualty.

... when the president and other prominent officials stand by as four Americans die and then abuse their sacrifice as contemptuously as this administration did, decency requires that they be voted out of office as an act of urgent political hygiene."

At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al. seem to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that at the ceremony Joe Biden strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a “loud and boisterous” voice, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”

One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political bigshot.

.... But a funny thing happened over the next six weeks: Obama’s own cue balls shriveled. Biden had offered up a deft campaign slogan encompassing both domestic and foreign policy: “Osama’s dead and General Motors is alive.” But, as the al-Qaeda connections to Benghazi dribbled out leak by leak, the “Osama’s dead” became a problematic boast and, left to stand alone, the General Motors line was even less credible. Avoiding the economy and foreign affairs, Obama fell back on Big Bird, and binders, and bayonets, just to name the “B”s in his bonnet.

At the second presidential debate, he name-checked Planned Parenthood, the General Motors of the American abortion industry, half a dozen times, desperate to preserve his so-called gender gap. Yet oddly enough, the more furiously Obama and Biden have waved their binders and talked up Sandra Fluke, the more his supposed lead among women has withered away. So now he needs to enthuse the young, who turned out in such numbers for him last time. Hence, the official campaign video (plagiarized from Vladimir Putin of all people) explaining that voting for Obama is like having sex. The saddest thing about that claim is that, for liberals, it may well be true.

[....]

If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it’s very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria’s supposed wedding advice to her daughter: “Lie back and think of England.”

Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep with a $16 trillion broke loser twice?

Friday, 26 October 2012

At Commentary, our friend Rick Richman quotes "this 2010 exchange with the prime minister, after the president had omitted Israel from the itineraries of his multiple trips to the region."

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: … I want to thank you, too, for the great hospitality you and the First Lady have shown Sara and me and our entire delegation. And I think we have to redress the balance — you know, I’ve been coming here a lot. It’s about time –

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I’m ready.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: — you and the First Lady came to Israel, sir.